George Pyle: At The Salt Lake Tribune, taking 34 for the team

Newspaper reporters often come to the office after sitting through a trial involving particularly sad testimony or gory evidence. After talking to people who have lost their homes to wildfires, their children to drunk drivers, their parents to Alzheimer’s.

Often, we have to take a moment. We tease each other about being vultures, scavengers who benefit from the misfortune of others. Sometimes there is some grisly laughter that makes it possible to get through the process of not only learning these horrible things, but telling the world about them.

We have a job to do and we usually do it surprisingly well, under deadline pressure, with a need to set aside some — but not all — of our natural human emotions to tell the stories that need telling.

You read The Salt Lake Tribune’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles about the many cases of sexual assault and bureaucratic neglect on a handful of Utah’s university campuses. So you know that doing that job that well required just the right amount of empathy. Sometimes supplemented with tears, hugs and not a small amount of alcohol — after the presses roll or, these days, the articles are launched.

Monday, those tears, those hugs — and not a small amount of alcohol — were for us.

That was the day that 34 top-flight newspaper reporters, editors, photographers and support folks were told that they had to take one for the team. That, despite all our grand hopes that we had been rescued from the clutches of a weasel New York hedge fund by one of the most public-spirited of Utah families — which we had — the changes in the world of journalism and the freefall of revenue into The Tribune made it necessary to shrink the payroll by about a third.

I escaped. Again. As I have a few times before. Here and elsewhere.

The one time I was tossed overboard in hopes of keeping the aircraft aloft, a long time ago at a much smaller newspaper, I was the only one so ejected. It seemed to help. The newspaper is still there. Though it has shrunk a few more times in the years since, was sold by a local family to a national chain, and shrunk again.

I was not happy about it. I had a family to support, including a son who was not yet 2 years old. But I found one job, offered partly out of pity, that made use of my writing ability (which is all I really have) for a while and then wandered back into the newspaper dodge.

I hope the same — or better — for all my colleagues who are joining the great journalistic diaspora of the 21st century.

What the rest of the world, particularly readers of The Tribune, need to know is that while there was a lot of sadness and a little fear in our offices that day, there was also some love and some hope. Love for each other. Hope for our profession and our institution.

With instant access to worldwide media not controlled by their suddenly former employer, those let go might well have launched a round of invective against The Tribune and its managers.

Nope.

First, there were tears and hugs. Then people talking to their former editors and ex-co-workers about the content of the files, the stacks of paper, the thumb drives and government documents and websites that those still working here would need to pick up where the dismissed journalists had left off. Special projects. Ongoing watchdog efforts. The good sources. The blockbuster stories they never got around to doing. Handed down, like many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, to those who must carry on the work.

Then the tweets and the Facebook posts. Some sadness and resignation but at least as much in the Utah spirit of don’t mourn, organize. Support journalism in general and The Tribune in particular, they said on their way out into the world. Read. Advertise. Subscribe. Subscribe. Subscribe.

Don’t let your totally justified sympathy for those let go turn you against The Tribune. We still have a job to do, a job that is crucial to not only our democratic form of government but our culture as a whole.

We will have to be more selective, skipping some meetings, events and even scandals in order to continue to seek out the really important stuff even — especially — when some in power don’t want us to.

To give up on us now would be like refusing to eat because you can’t get any more of those bananas you really like. Bananas are good, and really healthy. But there’s a lot more food out there. You still have to eat.

And so do we.

George Pyle is, inexplicably, still the editorial page editor of The Salt Lake Tribune. gpyle@sltrib.com